a man amidst mankind: back again to dasein

It depends on the manner in which you construe the meaning of “contraption” here.

For example: google.com/search?tbm=bks&h … ontraption

From my frame of mind, “I” is an existential contraption in that it is pieced together from day to day based on the accumulation of hundreds and thousands of unique and personal experiences, relationships and access to ideas that you made contact with. It is contrived – constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed – out of all of these variables in a world awash in contingency, chance and change.

It is also deemed an intellectual contraption by me because many piece together a sense of self out of the meaning that they impart to a particular collection of words they use to descibe themselves.

Now, some will argue that the human brain is one of nature’s own contraptions. It is extremely complicated and put together in a way that we have barely scratched the surface in exploring.

Also, a contraption able to actually invent the word “contraption” and then squabble over what it is said to really mean.

All the while [some insist] having no actual capacity to do so freely. I “chose” to use the word contraption the way I do here because I was never able not to.

On the other hand, the manner in which I do “choose” to use it here…what does that have to do with the behaviors of otters?

What do otters know of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy?

I’m at a loss to understand your point about them.

You act as though I were trying to reconfigue the word “contraption” into this…thing. As though I can take it out of my pocket and say, “look everyone, a contraption”.

Schizophrenia might be thought of as one of the mental illness “contraptions” the brain is able engender in any particular mind. A classic example of how the brain itself takes charge of “I” and chemically, neurologically compels it to think and feel and say and do any number of things it would never have chosen before the illness took root.

Unless of course even a disease free mind itself is doing only what nature compels it to do.

No, in my world, “I” struggle to understand the extent to which I can ever really be certain of any of this. There are relationships that appear to true objectively for all of us. Relationships that appear to be entirely correlated year in and year out such that most of us speak of them as inhabiting the “either/or” world.

What I then ponder is whether in a determined universe even the is/ought world is just another manifestation of the either/or world.

So, is this or is this not just psycho-babble? Have you “captured” me here? Maybe.

But my concern with the people at Huntsville is the same as my concern with the people here: the extent to which they are themselves able to make that crucial distinction between what they believe is true or think they know “in their head” and what they are able to demonstrate that all rational men and women are obligated to believe and know.

There are “the facts” about any particular execution. There is the fact of the execution itself. But what are the facts when the discussion shifts to capital punishment as a value judgment.

That is when I tumble down into my hole. Why? Because given how I have come to understand the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy, it makes sense to.

But: How I have come to understand them is no less an existential contraption. I have no way myself in which to demonstrate that others ought to share my point of view.

As near as I can figure myself out here [re motivation and intention] it somehow revolves around this:

“He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest.” John Fowles

But how would I even begin to go back over the course of my actual lived life and piece together all of the thousands upon thousands of existential variables that predisposed me here and now to note that?

It’s like that scene from sex, lies and videotape…

Ann: I just wanna ask a few questions, like why do you tape women talkin’ about sex? Why do you do that? Can you tell me why?
Graham: I don’t find turning the tables very interesting.
Ann: Well, I do. Tell me why, Graham.
Graham: Why? What? What? What do you want me to tell you? Why? Ann, you don’t even know who I am. You don’t have the slightest idea who I am. Am I supposed to recount all the points in my life leading up to this moment and just hope that it’s coherent, that it makes some sort of sense to you? It doesn’t make any sense to me. You know, I was there. I don’t have the slightest idea why I am who I am, and I’m supposed to be able to explain it to you?

I’m basically Graham here.

And I suspect that any number of folks react to my frame of mind here as they do because they suspect that I seem to be suggesting that they are too.

I hope you have noticed that Faust is now saying similar things to what I have been saying about the way you engage in dialogue: that you shift the context of statements and do not actually (in many cases) respond to points made. And that after shifting the context, you then say that what we said ‘failed’, where this failure has nothing to do with our intentions or the context.

Phyllo has had similar reactions.

If you have the goal to gain some sense of ‘how to live life’ or how to resolve conflicting goods or any other issue via dialogue, you might want to notice that other people you claim to respect have similar reactions to your ability to actually read and listen to the people you are having a dialogue with.

You can tell each of us individually that ‘really’ we are afraid of your probing or we are objectivists or we are using psychobabble or we are serious philosophers or what we are saying are mere contraptions…

but perhaps noticing the pattern with you as the locus, you might want to consider that you are contributing to the reduced liklihood of finding solutions to your questions or learning something else, or being a worthwhile discussion partner.

Perhaps those are not actually your goals. Being a gadfly, trying to irritate people, having a pastime that is a distraction from pain…as a few other possibilities off the top of my head, are also human endeavors. If they or something other than having a real dialogue are your goals, well, steady ahead. Perhaps I am naive for taking your expressed goals as your real goals.

Steve Colbert with his lovely conservative character expresses conservative goals while actually, obviously, doing something else and having other goals.

Note to others:

What on earth does any of this have to do with the points I raised above?!!

Instead, I become the point. He “exposes” me. The pulls back the curtain and reveals what I am really all about here. Over and over and over again.

In other words, revealing far more what he is really all about in reacting to me.

You know, whatever that is.

It has nothing to do with those points. It has to do with you. I think that is very clear. I always cite portions of your posts when I respond to them. Here I am obviously reacting to you and what you do here and the pattern of reactions to you from a number of people, including those you claim to respect.

I did read your ‘response’ to my earlier post with the otters. I saw no effort at all to try to understand the distinction between the two otters’ behavior or why I react to your position the way I do. It was quite a bit of effort on my part to see if the communication around contraption could be better between us. I was trying to bridge the way we use the term ‘contraption’ and react to it. And you avoided actually dealing with the core example or asking for clarification. IOW no effort to show you understood me, to counter the specific points I raised or to interact with the ideas. As per usual you used it as a stimulus to restate your opinions.

IOW: You did not ‘raise any points’, you simply restated your position.

So, why did I focus on you, then…?

Online discussion forums tend to be limited communities, but still, like any group that meets with some focus - book clubs, hiking groups, whatever - a person’s behavior in the group may become the focus of conversation between that person and one or more others.

In individual posts, reacting to each of us, you claim that our reactions are really about us. You dismiss any criticism either as because we are afraid of the horror of your hole or as not answering your core questions, as if we were trying to do the latter. Once there is a pattern, sometimes people reevaluate. Hey, I have heard this same kind of criticism from a number of people. Perhaps there is some truth in what each of them says.

You don’t seem to be a person who reevaluates. I have responded to other people in a similar way that I respond to you here. IOW posted focused on their patterns of communication. In every other case this lead to some kind of exchange where I noticed the other person reevaluate some of their patterns. They didn’t necessarily agree, but they made clear attempts to understand and by the end did understand what I meant. Generally the reaction included the intention to consider the idea if not agreeing that their was something to it. This included pms.

Your responses are either winking to the gallery or flat denial or repeating yourself.

I don’t expect much from you, anymore. But holding the mirror up to you entails my making the mirror. And the kind of patterns of denial, distraction and narcissism I see in you, are patterns I encounter irl. It is useful for me to notice and point them out. As I said elsewhere, not to you, there is a part of me that is still surprised, after all this time, that people behave the way you do. That naivte needs to be whittled away.

Think of yourself as an opportunity for me to really get that people can behave like you do, while at least presenting as having no idea themselves. And obviously dasein is involved here to a high degree in the why of the way you are and your unwillingness to even for a moment consider that someone else’s criticism of your behavior might have merit.

I love the irony of you saying I did not respond to your latest post. You seem to think, as a rule, that restating your position is a response. I am not sure you can interact with other people’s ideas and/or have an interest in doing so, which makes your participation in a philosophy forum…hm…strange.

And it really is funny watching you over and over, even in recent posts, criticize people for not solving your philosophical problems when their focus is on something else and the threads are not even yours.

It’s a kind of narcissism which assumes that everything either satisfies your desires or fails to. That other people might have their own goals and contexts and interest seems unthinkalbe to you. I am sure you know this at the abstract level, that we have these things, but in every specific context, you are oblivious.

And then Faust’s last response to you in the problem of abstraction thread. Where he points out that it is a thread he started so the fact that it is not satisfying your needs is not his problem. Narcissism. And then that what you are asking near the end has already been explained. Poor reading or a lack of interest in reading what people actually write.

Now you can comment that I am ‘revealing you’ and imply to the gallery that ‘we all know’ what my real motives are. Or you could consider what I and others are writing.

When you wink to the gallery as if there is an obvious intepretation, you undermine all of what you are saying about dasein, since dasein leads to humans acting in an incredibly wide range of ways given their backgrounds, cultures, innate tendencies, personalities.

The ‘oh, we all know what his actual motivations must be’ winking to the gallery is both hypocritical - given what you repeat over and over here about how different we all are - and cowardly. Since you avoid openly making what would be a silly claim to knowledge.

My “behavior” here revolves first and foremost around my quotes, film and music threads.

Mostly for all of the virtual friends I have bumped into over the years online,

Beyond that is my interest in probing the question “how ought one to live” in a No God world seeminly devoid of objective morality.

And then my interest in the bigger questions like determinism and why there is something instead of nothing.

So: If the manner in which I communicate my points here is not someone’s cup of tea, they can simply move on to others.

Then stuff like this:

Which particular posts relatings to which particular contexts? Cite actual examples of this so that we can bring these accusations down to earth. But let the examples revolve around the points that I make in the OP here.

This is the part where I suggest that as a philosopher, you’ll make a great psychiatrist.

My advice is that you give up on me and move on to psycho-analyzing others.

Perhaps even charge them.

And trust me: this sort of thing tells us far more about you anyway.

Among other things, it sounds like a personal problem.

Irrelevent. Are you really saying that my points about your behavior don’t matter since most of your posts are in threads where other people do not participate?

It’s cute wording: ‘they can simply…’

IOW you are not interested in how your behavior affects other people, even though you want to know how one ought to live.

But further, I said why I point out your behavioral patterns. They are fascinating. And the lengths you go to never acknowledge anything is also fascinating.

I could simply stop. But then, I don’t want to.

Then stuff like this:

I’ve done that time and again. The implication here is that I just make general critiques, when I have time and again, with careful citation of instances where you are doing these things.

Psychologist thank you. Not much of a fan of psychiatry. And sure, I do this in relation to you as you do in relation to me and others. But, unlike the roleo of a psychologist, I point out behavioral patterns in your interactions with others that either contradict your own philosophy and supposed goals, or end up functioning like trolling. Obviously your behavior does not matter to you despite your supposed interest in finding out how one ought to live. It’s not therapy, it’s a kind of single case research. And I am happy, right now, to have you as a test subject. Never seen anything like this.

[/quote]
I’d say ’ it sounds like that to you’ but I don’t even believe that. But nice implied objectivism. We all know what this means. LOL
The man who suggests that dasein can lead to a range of beliefs and motivations in a single person, always implies that there is only one motivation for each behavior, like mine here, when he is in conflict with someone. And this interpretation is one that either insults others or makes himself look good. Coincidentally, of course.

From the OP…

But of course when it comes to dealing with someone critical of you, their criticism can only come from one motivation, because when push comes to shove, you don’t really believe your ideas around dasein. Or you can’t be honest with yourself and others.

And as usual, the man who wants to know how one ought to live is not the slightest bit interested in how he is living, how it affects other people and what he might be doing interpersonally that is reducing effective communication, misrepresenting others and judging them incorrectly.

If you don’t like it, don’t read it, he says.
.
I certainly will stop reading it the day I understand what you are doing. I may stop for other reasons, if the repetition gets too boring. But so far, you still manage to pull out new and interesting ways to not acknowledge anything, to distract and complain and to find ways to make it seem like you are responding when you are not.

Either make this about the manner in which the OP is applicable to you – with respect to “I” at the intersection of identity, value judgments and political power – or move on to others.

I get enough of the “accusations” and the “retorts” you dump on me above from the Kids.

You may well grasp my “behavioral patterns” here better than I do myself. But how does that make the points I raise in the OP any less applicable to you?

That’s basically my aim here. To take those points and to situate them “out in the world” that we live in. Lives that often result in conflicts over value judgments.

Iambiguous-
Same old stuff. I am going to cut off the lines we have gotten into since I keep meeting the same patterns. So, reset from zero. We will meet again in new spots and from here on out I will use the shorthand set out below. Should you actually respond and appear to have read what I wrote, I will then respond normally. Otherwise… shorthand
SAOAR: Shifting away onus and responsibility.
NIST: Narcissistic Illogical Shift of Topic. Treating something as a failed solution to your core problems and/or bringing up your core topic as if it is a response when it is a change of topic.
RR: Redundant Request. That is requests for things already done which led nowhere.
SCMR: Self-congratulatory mind reading claims

Okay, it’s settled then. We move on to others.

“Identity and Freedom in Being and Nothingness”
Stephen Wang in Philosophy Now magazine.

Me, I start here of course: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529

Thus making what I construe to be a crucial distinction between those aspects of “I” that appear more rather than less beyond our control, and those aspects that appear to be more rather than less in our control but are rooted more rather than lessin in dasein.

Here, however, my own refrain is basically, “one way or the other it’s still largely dasein.” Whether we act in a certain way because of our identity or act in a certain way and thus establish our identity, we still live in a world bursting at the seams with contingency chance and change. A world in which both our identity and our actions are predicated only more or less on our control of new experiences, new relationships and contact with new information, knowledge and ideas.

The identity that we think we have “here and now” is predicated in large part on our indoctrination by others “there and then” as a child in a particular world historically and culturally. And the choices that we then make, the actions that we then take to reconfigure “I” existentially are [in my view] still ever a work in progress from the cradle to the grave. And never within reach of a moral narrative that establishes one’s true identity in sync with the right thing to do.

In other words, the existentialists focus on “authenticity” in order to suggest that attempts to objectify the self are “inauthentic”. Either the selves of others or your own. But while I can clearly understand this given the manner which objectivists among us are the rule, there is only so much one can accomplish in pinning down “authentic” choices in the is/ought world.

Was Sartre being authentic when he placed his bet on “ultra Bolshevism” and Maoists? Or was he instead succeeding only in objectifying his own political narrative in the name of taking that “condemned to be free” existential leap?

My point in regard to identity here is that there do not appear to be right or wrong answers to questions like this. There is only what appears to be “I” as an existential contraption rooted in dasein.

in a nut shell sartre’s turning to communism in his critique of dialectical reason was a conclusion arrived at necessarily to resolve what he perceived as THE fundamental problem humanity is faced with. and that is - in his language - the objectification of the ‘other’ as a being-in-itself, something that causes the for-itself to forego its freedom… and this was a no-no for sartre. capitalist society… with its commodification of labor and the alienation of the proletariat, was exemplary at creating this problem… so the logical solution to him was the inception of a classless society.

of course for sartre, hell would always be other people, but society would be less of a hell if there was far less objectification going on. he didn’t want people to be ‘things’, as being such is a tremendous restriction of freedom.

I know what Sartre felt from when I was living in the same house as another philosopher and his girlfriend below a cartoonist who did things like rollerskating and gamelan practice on our very thin ceiling.

Ultrabolshevism, Maoism, is interesting in that it represents a very clear minded passion, unapologetic in its will to power. Bolshevism in general is naked wtp vs menshevism which is more western. I don’t know Sartre enough to say this for sure but he was likely disgusted enough with the world not to have any illusions. But he wasn’t German in that he wanted to do all that nasty power grubbing himself all too literally. The French always have the problem of refined taste which isn’t compatible with direct expressions of will to power, they always need some explosive human Other to do the job for them.

More to the point [mine] hell is not just other people. It is also yourself. One way or another you turn yourself into a “thing” – an “object” – when you make distinctions between the right thing to do – or in living authentically – and the wrong thing to do – or in living inauthentically. Morally and politically in other words.

On the other hand, in the either/or world, there very often is a right and a wrong way to do things. I would bring this up with Mr. Reasonable for example. If you start with the assumption that capitalism is the right political economy and you set yourself a goal of becoming financially secure as a capitalist, then you either accomplish this by choosing the right behaviors or you don’t by choosing the wrong behaviors.

But if someone comes along and insists that buying and selling stocks is a component of the necessarily evil capitalist political economy, what then?

How is it determined that either capitalism or socialism is more clearly in sync with living an authentic life? And how are the objectivists on either side here not basically reconfiguring “I” from an existential contraption rooted in dasein and conflicting goods into an insufferably self-righteous authoritarian hell bent on turning the world into “one of us” vs. “one of them”?

Camus seemed to place his bet more on individual freedom – a man or a woman choosing to live an authentic life by rejecting overarching moral and political dogmas. But that doesn’t make the points raised by, among others, Marx and Engels go away.

The personal is always going to be political when the “rules of society” are set into place by those who have accumulated the most economic and political power.

“Identity and Freedom in Being and Nothingness”
Stephen Wang in Philosophy Now magazine.

Here though Sartre would have had to note for me an action that he chose, and then clearly described for me this juncture at which his sense of identity is the starting point for the action or the action itself is the starting point for his identity. How in the world can they not be all tangled together in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein and conflicting goods?

Unless of course I am simply missing the point here.

The act that he embodied in choosing an existential leap to Maoism flowed in large part from all of the existential variables in his life that predisposed him to go in that direction.

Sort of his own personal rendition of the points I raise here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382

And then having acted from that trajectory he creates many new existential variables that will propel “I” further. He has new experiences, new relationships, access to new ideas [in a world of contingency, chance and change] and thus “I” evolves accordingly.

It’s not like he woke up one morning, turned to Simone, and just blurted out “I’m a Maoist!”. Of course the manner in which his own particular “I” was predisposed to go in that direction played an enormous part in the action to choose itself. And that he acted as he did in itself precipitated new factors that would impact profoundly on the life that he lived.

But only [in my view] to the extent that one comes to recognize “I” as an existential contraption rooted in dasein.

“Identity and Freedom in Being and Nothingness”
Stephen Wang in Philosophy Now magazine.

You either get this or you don’t.

But: How to explain it if you do.

For me it’s an overpass at Herring Run Park. On some days it became a real ordeal making it from one end to another. The knowing that I was never quite sure if I wanted to tumble over into oblivion. And grappling with the tug of war being waged inside my head by psychological forces I would never be able to actually explain. Not even to myself.

It was an entirely different kind of anguish because it came from deep down inside myself. It was like grappling with the reality of existing itself but not knowing what the hell that actually meant.

And [of course] right around the corner from Sartre’s nausea. Which was in turn largely ineffable. “I” free to topple over into the abyss. But never quite believing that I ever would. But never absolutely certain of it.

And this frame of mind can be directed outward towards others as well. All of the terrible things that you can inflict on them if only “I” comes around to a set of circumstances that makes it all the more possible.

What could you do? What are you convinced that you could not do? I still recall an incident at college when, in Vaneeta Burkhardt’s abnormal psychology class, the discussion got around to murder. “Could you murder someone?”, she asked. And of course the students [all fresh out of high school] were absolutely certain that they could not. But I had enrolled in college on the GI Bill. I had just been discharged from the Army, having spent a year in Vietnam. An experience in which the man I was before the war had been completely reconfigured into basically a whole other person. At least in some important respects.

I knew [intellectually, viscerally] how a set of circumstances could prompt you to do things that, before the experience, you never even imagined that you could or would do.

“Identity and Freedom in Being and Nothingness”
Stephen Wang in Philosophy Now magazine.

This is basically surreal to me. As though “I” can decide never to gamble again in the same manner in which one’s sexual behaviors can be changed through, say, surgical castration. “I” make a resolution in one set of circumstances not to gamble but this can be sustained only to the extent that those circumstances never change. Once the circumstances change all bets are off. In my view, only if “I” here was in fact a “thing” able to be commanded surgically [or through medication] such that biologically a new set of imperatives is set in place, would the resolution be sustained with any real degree of certainty.

Otherwise, new experiences and new relationships in a world of contingency, chance and change still prevails.

Exactly. Only if he puts himself in a situation where he literally cannot gamble is “I” here on a secure leash.

In other words, each new set of circumstances requires a new resolution. And, sure, if “I” here was not an existential contraption ever subject to dealing with these new contingencies, a more objectivist sense of self might be possible.

I merely note the extent to which all of this is true in regard to “I” acquiring moral and political values in turn; and then embracing one or another objectivist font in order to reconfigure “I” into [b]I.[/b]

no i’m with you one hundred percent. spend enough time doing philosophy… and doing it right… and you end up at the logical conclusion of nihilism. but this nihilism isn’t rooted in some existential dread or anxiety from the knowledge of meaningless. things are quite meaningful, in fact. rather philosophical nihilism, for me, is a kind of post-wittgensteinian conclusion to the ineffability of sense in the philosophical language game. for years i was part of it, then i got out of it, and from that vantage point i was able to see how it worked more clearly than ever. i see it all the time now; i read a text and immediately recognize how many different ways and to what ends it can be interpreted by other writers/readers who have in mind something entirely different when using such concepts and ideas. the apparent ‘fusion’ of agreement that you see when posters correspond is a state that’s reached not necessarily because what is being said is sensible, but because there is nothing against which its sense and reference can be tested so to be shown to be wrong. it is this frictionless atmosphere that philosophy exists in which allows it such passage, and the scrutiny of the natural sciences can’t touch it (unfortunately). so long as you realize that philosophy is nothing more than play, you’d not invest too much seriousness in it to be disappointed when you discovered you’ve been misunderstood.

the important things in life are handled by the sciences… and if you’ll notice, the ethical problems tend to work themselves out naturally and without much guidance from philosophy. think of it as a natural ‘correcting’ mechanism that works very slowly and over vast periods of time. you’ll note also how both those in power as well as those without are by and large philosophically illiterate. what then is running the show? what then is guiding that great hegelian dialectic of the real being/becomming rational, whatever whatever? it certainly isn’t attributed to philosophy. what it is is what marx had made a point of explaining in so many ways; that the material relations of a society have absolute influence on the engendered ideas that rule an epoche… that ideology does not organize society and its material relations, but vice-versa. that philosophers need only realize that their language is a distorted language of the actual world. so on and so forth.

that being said, the engine that moves progress will always tend toward the greater distribution of a hedonic calculus that works out naturally… kinda like a set of governing rules that oversees society’s development which philosophers can’t quite get at completely, though their business is always to try and describe/explain it. but as said above, these theories always come ‘after the fact’, out of the exiting material relations, and therefore reflect the ambitions and orientations of the theorists themselves who are embedded very certainly in some circumstances that either benefit them or not. as it stands, there are more people than not who are not benefiting from the present circumstances… hence, the forwarding of that correcting mechanism that works above and beyond any philosophical attempt to grasp its nature. marx was spot on when he removed this dialectic from the hegelian metaphysics and put it back into the concrete, social sphere as an expression of real progress… how societies evolve.

so don’t think of marx and engels in terms of ‘philosophical objectivists’ who are trying to persuade philosophers to ‘join them’. that’s for ideologues, not marx and co. if these two did anything, it was to show how despite the ways in which we interpret the world philosophically, history follows a very rational course always trending toward increasing the hedonic margins for the population of the planet. in other words, greater reward for physical labor. i know, its an embarrassingly simple formula and philosophers hate that it’s so easy. they’d prefer to complicate the matter… especially those who profit from the present system.

so forget about what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. the continuum isn’t moving toward righter or wronger, but what is more efficient, cost effective, less wasteful, more distributed, etc. this shit works automatically, bro. you could make philosophy disappear and it would still happen. philosophy is not the source of it, nor can it stop it. there simply cannot be a philosophical narrative that could convince people they shouldn’t want to better their lives… and since the vast majority are struggling at the advantage of a much smaller minority, that mechanism works to resolve the conflict. its like a collective sixth sense, so to speak. these people don’t know the first thing about ‘philosophy’. perhaps because ‘philosophy does not real work (W)’?

yeah so no, my nihilism is not at all what the existential theater has portrayed it to be. it’s no passive resignation to fate or any bullshit like that. rather it’s an active nihilism that invites radical, experimental change if even it puts the world in danger. i have a profound faith in man as a creature that is notorious for figuring out how to make shit work. my nihilism is not a loss of faith in man, but a high spirited casual withdrawal from philosophical floundering. i’m not interested anymore in asking stupid metaphysical questions. been there done that. i mean sure, i too have esoteric thoughts and weird ideas, but i realize that they cannot be talked about clearly… so with them i pass by in silence.

simplify dude. right shoe goes on the right foot, left shoe on the left foot. who was the eastern zen master who said that? i forget.

Well put. And I basically agree. But we live in a world where the objectivists – God or No God – never, ever let you forget their own obligatory moral and political narratives.

All I can do is to yank their intellectual contraptions – their “general descriptions” – down out of clouds and force them to defend their “definitional logic” out in the world of actual conflictng behaviors.

Here though everything depends on the actual set of circumstances that you find yourself in. For example, before and after you have children. Or before and after you find yourself in a situation that is particularly satisfying. The last thing many will want then is to rock the boat.

And of course actual options have to be available to you. And then for most of us you still have to come up with a way of getting the bills paid. Compromise is almost always built into that.

From my perspective, the context and the point of view feed on and then sustain each other. And every individual’s juncture here is going to be his or her own. Maybe others can understand it [or parts of it] and maybe not.

And I still have to contend with the manner in which I construe human interactions in my signature threads.

The big questions never lose their fascination for me. But that’s always embedded in dasein. And, again, the extent to which nihilism provokes a positive or a negative reaction to life itself is derived more from the life that you live than anything that philosophers might encompass didactically.

The crucial factor here is that as a nihilist your options are almost always increased because you don’t have to keep your behaviors in sync with the “right thing to do”.

Though, needless to say, "for better or worse.

“Identity and Freedom in Being and Nothingness”
Stephen Wang in Philosophy Now magazine.

This exposes the extent to which how [for some of us] the more you attempt to think through a situation looking for reason and motive and meaning, the more you actually come to things like dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

The part about “overwhelming desire” seems more in sync with the libido, with instinct, with those deep down inside drives the human brain is notorious for. Just go where they take you, right? Why? Because as soon as you stop to think it all through rationally, to “analyze” it all “philosophically”, the more likely you are to end up in the hole that “I” am in all busted up like Humpty Dumpty.

All I can say here is that this is more or less what happened to me the more I became immersed in existentialism, deconstruction and semiotics. I began to see how my own objectivist frame of mind was largely just a world of words brought together either by God or political ideology.

And, now, as a moral nihilist, that anguish pops up whenever I am confronted with conflicting goods embedded in this:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

“I” am no longer able to think myself up out of it.

You either come to embody this frame of mind or you don’t. For me, it’s not so much bearing the responsibility of recreating my identity “authentically”, but of recognizing how many variables here are either beyond my comprehension or beyond my control. And that no set of behaviors is necessarily either more or less authentic. The “nausea” is derived from the manner in which I construe “I” as the fractured and fragmented embodiment of dasein.